[lit-ideas] Sunday Story

From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

Date: Sun, 24 Apr 2011 12:16:31 -0700

Ethiopia is currently bottom of one awful World league table: one in twenty
seven pregnancies in that country leads to a maternal death. (Those
statistics' closest bleak competitors are to be found in Pakistan, India,
Nigeria.) At a lecture on the subject this week, we were told tales of women
the same age as my daughters, the same age as my students, walking to hospital,
their fourth or fifth child having got stuck. Since no one goes anywhere in
the dark, they set off at dawn. An American doctor on a month's trip out of
Oregon said she learned to look at knees; if these were scraped and bloody, the
labor had been long and painful.
At the time of the talk she'd only been back in the U.S. one day, so as I write
the woman whose life she saved just before returning is currently recovering
somewhere in a ward or hut. That woman was brought to hospital with a ruptured
uterus. Seeing how much blood had been lost, the surgeon asked the husband to
donate. Afraid of getting AIDS, he refused. She donated some of her own.
Today's newspaper's seven day forecast? "Showers, wet day, dry p.m.?, rain,
showers, rain chance, partly cloudy."
Sheila Saltmarsh, Verna Dalrymple, Frances Enabit, Marie Twiss, Walter Benwell
Hinson II, the Rev Norman Prentice Aldred, Meredith Lokelani Crossley Young,
Herbert Augustus Preskey, Darrell Dustin De Borde, Marie Theresa (Vinciquerra)
Rischiotto and Mildred Sanders... died.
Garden Guy was having a good week until "the dogs" suddenly drugged his
kidneys. A run to the store for two bottles of cranberry juice solved the
problem. His steps, his wall, the whole project are very close to "looking
tits." And done.
David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon
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